With „pulsar _1“ for four live performers and electronics, I continue a line in my compositional work, whose characteristic is the close association of live performance with prepared computer music. A further focus lies in the complex, polymetric framework, which forms the basis for this piece. I imagine the music in different, isolated strands, each running in its own individual tempo. The resulting tempo polyphony represents a kind of metaphorical image of “life”: just as differing time layers exist side by side (in bodily functions, psychological time perception or chronological time measurements), my music should consist of constantly changing complexes of simultaneously occurring situations in different tempi.
The limiting factor is the coordination. Thanks to the computer, tempo relations of almost any kind are comprehensible, i.e. composable. Similarly, accelerations and decelerations are possible at different degrees of tempo. To fit live players into this structure, they must be connected by signal to the computer, each receiving, according to need, his own tempo program, which is heard via funk as a small click (metronome) in the ear. Thus, it is possible for all events to be synchronized exactly (this is what I mean by composable). Equally possible are also “blur fields”, which are the opposite of the immutability of the sequence of events of a time-mechanical mechanism, thus creating a sort of counterpoint.
Finally there is the space component to consider: All acoustic events should be reproducible, in principle, in all possible locations of a room. This requires of the hardware, an array of loudspeakers placed around the audience, and of the software, the availability of a program that permits the most accurate room modulations. This is possible with the Ambisonic Method, which was developed at the Zurich University of the Arts.
Pulsars are rotating neutron stars, which emit radio waves at regular intervals. J. Bell Burnell, who was the first to discover these signals in Cambridge in 1967, believed initially, that she had contacted an extraterrestrial civilization. But finally she arrived at the less romantic explanation of wave pulses, which occur via a complex interaction between magnetic fields and the matter surrounding them. Whatever: supernatural or scientific logic – pulses, waves, life – rationality or fantasy – people, machines – numbers or rituals – all should have their due place in my new composition series “pulsar”, which continues with the work technique I first used in “Rattaplasma 2” and “Waves”.
